Star Force Review

The scrolling shooter game with no power-ups. Except one. And that one really doesn't count.

The review of this product is based on a re-released version of the game. Because of this change of medium and the passage of time, it is possible that there are slight factual differences between the original retail product and the version reviewed. The following review should be used as a reference for how well the game stood up over time rather than an evaluation of how it would have scored based on its original release date.

You don't get any missiles. No speed increases, no laser upgrades. No secondary-fire tag-along options and definitely not any defensive force fields. Star Force is such an early, straightforward arcade shooter design that it seems to have pre-dated the concept of power-ups -- making it just you, with your stock, uncustomizable ship against wave after wave of progressively more difficult alien attackers. It sounds like it'd be a horribly unfair fight. And it is. And it kind of works.

Star Force is a 1983 arcade release from Tecmo, and it's somehow alluring in its archaic simplicity. You find yourself ducking, dodging and weaving your woefully weakened vessel around the screen in desperate attempts to stay alive amidst nearly endless onslaughts of enemy ordnance, all the while wishing for some kind of collectible assistance to come floating along and give your offensive capabilities a boost. But it never does. And you end up adapting to, and ultimately enjoying, the severe one-sidedness of it all.

OK, so there actually is one power-up -- a little blue icon that, when collected, doubles your ship's rate of fire. It seems helpful, and even a bit of a morale booster, in that it changes the background music to something a bit more up-tempo and heroic when you get it. But, effect-wise, it really isn't that much of a power-up in the end. Your gun still fires straight up the vertically-scrolling screen -- it's just faster. You can almost affect the same result by just hammering on the fire button more rapidly with your un-upgraded ship. So I'm writing that one off as the exception that proves the rule and maintaining that Star Force has no real power-ups.

That Alpha ship doesn't seem to have the most aerodynamic design.

Each level in Star Force is named after a letter of the Greek alphabet, so you get a bit of a linguistics lesson if you're able to survive very long -- Alpha is the first area, Beta is the next, Gamma's after that and so on. At the end of each stage, too, you face off against a boss ship with its hull emblazoned with one of those same fraternity row emblems. If you do enough damage to it, it'll explode and you'll move on to the next level. If you don't, you'll have to play through a piece of the same level you just saw again before the boss will re-appear for a rematch.

The formula works well, and pure mindless shooting fun results if you're the kind of player who can push past the frustrations of some early cheap deaths while you're learning some of the standard attack patterns thrown your way. There are a few annoyances, though, that could throw you off.

The first is an unfortunate sound effect selection. Some large enemies, like the stage bosses, make this metallic pinging noise when you shoot them -- and it's the same sound effect used in lots of other games to let you know that you're doing no damage. You know the one. "Ping, ping, ping. Try something else, because you're not getting past their shields." Except that, in Star Force, you actually are doing damage. So you have to unlearn a bit and keep on shooting, even when your brain trained on other games is telling you you're being ineffective.

The second is your ship's area of travel. You've got free reign to move up, down, left and right anywhere around the screen you like, which is good, because you'll need to have as much maneuverability as you can muster with no offensive power-ups coming your way to help you out. But then you'll come to find that you can't actually move anywhere on the screen -- there's an invisible wall about 75% of the way up that stops you from ever reaching the absolute top edge of the display.

It's mostly fine, as you'd rarely want to be up there where enemies spawn, because you'd get blasted pretty quickly. But then there will definitely be an occasion or two where you're hovering near that invisible barrier, and a ship shoots at you, and the only safe direction to dodge is up, and you can't. Because you hit that wall. And then you get blasted pretty quickly.

Star Force rounds things out in this Virtual Console Arcade edition by allowing you to toggle a handful of options, like the number of lives and the difficulty setting. And that's kind of nice, since pushing your reserve amount of ships up to five and the challenge level down to Easy can counterbalance any early frustrations and help you get more accustomed to this design. But you won't find anything more robust than that.

The Verdict

I expected to be underwhelmed by Star Force, going in, but this is one of those rare and unexpected surprise games that actually turned out to be more enjoyable than first guess would suggest. It's still not an amazing game, or even really one you'd call solidly good, as its simplicity, repetitive level design and too-tough level of challenge will probably turn off a lot of players. But if you don't reach for the power switch after just the first few minutes, and try to get into the relative unfairness of the no-power-ups design, you too might walk away with more of a grin than you'd thought you would. Star Force isn't the worst way to spend five bucks on the VCA.